


A Fulsum Fode

by landofspices



Series: Only Our Dark Does Lighten: canon-based episode tags [4]
Category: Robin Hood (BBC 2006)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canonical Character Death, Episode Related, F/M, M/M, Sexual Abuse, Stockholm Syndrome, Unrequited Love, the Guy/Marian is unrequited I am so sorry!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 03:05:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6548092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/landofspices/pseuds/landofspices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A missing scene from 3.6, "Do You Love Me?". Some time evidently passes between Guy killing the Sheriff and informing Prince John (he's sorted out his wound, at least), and this is a take on what happened during that gap. </p><p>[tw: abusive Vaisey/Guy; Guy has Stockholm Syndrome.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Fulsum Fode

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what this is; my mother insists RH is a children's show she used to watch with my little brother, but I've been mainlining it with my best friend and now we have a huge reservoir of shared headcanons and I've written this and 2/3 of another fic? srsly. Richard Armitage is some kind of witch.

I wolde ben clad in Cristes skyn  
that ran so long on blode  
and gon t'is herte and taken myn in—  
there is a fulsum fode!

— Middle English lyric

 

The warm night is full of seeping blossom, and the scent of wine drifts up from the banqueting hall into the soft dark air like a miasma. It hangs in Nottingham Castle's narrow stone passages; it clouds her battlements. _Revelry_ , it breathes: _gaiety, freedom_. But Guy of Gisborne has no stomach for revels. He drags himself over the stone parapet with a sobbing breath and folds onto the walkway that rims the castle's crenellated walls, scuttling backwards and away from his dead master with the dregs of his strength. At last he curls up like an animal or a child, his face pressed to his knees, where the familiar leathery smell should be consoling, but is not. His nostrils are full of the fleshy reek of his own blood, squeezing out of his thigh, and Vaisey's a few yards away. It's hard to breathe and Guy wonders if he has bled too much already and is, perhaps, going to die. It is deserved, but no less alarming for that: the fires of Hell, not the companionship of Marian in Heaven. She will never forgive him.

He gasps as terror takes him by the throat and cold sweat bathes his brow, tears come to his eyes and drip onto his leather breeches as he shudders with grief and fear. The pain in his leg is sickening but he would have it off – would take it off himself, this very instant, fearful as he has always been of disfigurement – in return for Marian, whole, not dropping butchered into the sand.

He thought he was alone afterwards, but he was not alone. They rode far together, and Guy recalls with nauseous clarity that at first he kept his pillion seat well, kept it instinctively, but that as they drew away from his crime, from Marian falling wide-eyed with his sword in her white breast, his legs and back weakened: he could not sit straight and he slumped, lay childishly against Vaisey's back, clung to him, and wept. No use, knowing that he would be roundly mocked for it; no use, for his body gave itself up to grief beyond willing, beyond choice. By then he had known many sorrows: had slain his own father, his own mother; orphaned his sister, and the Earl of Huntingdon by the bye; betrayed and killed, and sought to damn himself still deeper by adding regicide to his black record. Yet Marian slain by his hand was the last seal set upon all that darkness, a thing too bitter to compass or endure.

Guy's body buckled under the knowledge of what his hand had done, and he wept until drained, fell silent only until he had the strength to weep again. Vaisey's horse bore him, and Vaisey's body too, and he was for a time quiescent, stricken – like a bird from the bird chamber, he thought, months later, half-crushed by Vaisey's brutal hands. Now he would like to crush himself, would like to come apart entirely into shards of bone and flesh. His thigh is burning, as his whole body will burn soon enough. If this is how much it hurts when the pain is concentrated in only one place, he cannot think how a coward like Guy of Gisborne will bear eternity.

He wishes for an instant that he had fallen, that it was over, so that he might end the long presage to what he knows is awaiting, and will ever await him. Why did he force from himself that last terrible effort? When Marian asked him to kill Vaisey he said no – he still doesn't know why.

His later recollections are less clear than that ride with Vaisey, and although that should, perhaps, relieve him, it does not. He remembers slipping to the ground, into Vaisey's grasp, his cheeks sticky with tears: they dried fast in the sour heat of the Holy Land, but he replenished them fast, too. He remembers that he swayed as if fevered. Vaisey never let go of him, touched his brow for a moment, roughly, lip curling in disdain. Many times before that day he had unmanned himself in Vaisey's presence; tears of shame and tears of womanish terror, drawn from him with humiliating ease – oh, he has shed them; you do not stay more than ten years at Vaisey's side and keep a tittle of your dignity.

"Stop mewling, Gisborne," Vaisey would say if they were before others when Guy shamed himself, or if he were in an especially poor temper. If he were pretending kindness – a kindness which was never real, Guy learnt that quick enough – he would stroke Guy's cheek and say, "There, there. Hush, little one." His smile when he spoke like that was terrible. Only that time, some unknown distance from the worst thing Guy ever did, the grief was passed over in scornful silence. Guy decided much later, lying awake in his cold Engish bed, that since it certainly was not affection that stopped Vaisey's mouth, it must have been a recognition that at that moment the thing itself was as sore a pain as Guy was formed to feel, and no words could put a keener edge to his sorrow.

He remembers that after some time had passed Vaisey struck him across the cheek to summon him from his stupor. They were in a dim room. He held a water-skin to Guy's bleeding lips and Guy suckled at it, a desperate, sick thirst salting his throat. He swallowed, sobbed, retched, and Vaisey pushed back Guy's long sweat-clotted hair and struck him again: a precise, brief, intentional blow without rage. It was time to leave, he said. Time to take ship. Back to England, we can't stay here now. At sea, Guy was entranced by grief; occasionally he was required to give Vaisey the use of his mouth or his arse, but it was easier than usual, for Guy's mind lay scattered in the sands of Acre, where everything is red and white. He truly did not care what Vaisey wished to do with his body, although in fact the demands came less and less often as his master grew bored with a passivity which was uncaring and placid, rather than fearful; bored with the drip, drip, drip of tears shed during their couplings not in pain and not in fear of him, but for a dead woman, now rotting quickly somewhere in the sands.

He mentioned the decay of all fleshly matter to Guy of Gisborne in passing once, before he pulled out, and Guy shivered under him, his dark, dirty hair falling around the face of a martyr, a killer, a helpless child. "I know," Guy choked. "I know."

Now he uncurls and wipes his eyes and nose with his hand. His breath is still hitching with fear but he must be sure, he must be – if Vaisey _isn't_ dead, if Guy is mistaken, Vaisey will be so angry with him. More angry than he has ever been, and he has left Guy to die more than once: he has let Hood drown him, before his very eyes, and left him a prisoner in Hood's camp for terrifying hours, and sent him to Prince John, surely thinking the Prince would kill him. He is shivering, but he crawls forward little by little – hearing only his own loud breaths, nothing from Vaisey – until he is quite near the body and his right hand comes down on something small and sharp, which halts him with a gasp of fright. Guy picks it up, hating how his own fingers tremble, knowing it shows his weakness: the small sharp thing is Vaisey's tooth, loosened in the struggle.

 _A trophy_ , he thinks. _Prince John will like that_. And then he begins to cry again, much harder than before, a macabre echo of how he wept for Marian. He can see now that Vaisey isn't moving; there's no need to go closer. He couldn't if he tried, he's shaking so much. He feels sick with the pain of crawling on his wounded leg, and he tries to heave himself further away from the body as his stomach clenches, so that the guards who come to collect it will not guess how weak he was after the killing. But it's no good, and he can only turn his head aside as he vomits everything he has swallowed that day: little food, much wine.

Cold sweat prickles sharply under his arms, down his back, between his thighs. His hand clenches around Vaisey's tooth as if it were something that could help him. An indulgence, a pardon, a marriage-ring. Vaisey has bled heavily, and Guy is still bleeding; he crouches, trembling, in their mingled blood. He must stop weeping before he presents the tooth to Prince John. It will not do to shed these unseemly tears for the dead Sheriff. He must bind his thigh, hold in the blood which creeps out and weakens him more and more. There is nobody he can ask to do it, to touch him so near his prick; Guy does not trust his sister, nor the physician.

 _No one will help you_ , he tells himself, closing his eyes on the pictures of Robin Hood's men and their comradeship turned to the service of chaos, their easy fighting which looks enviable but furthers only lawlessness. He wants someone to come, that is the truth. He doesn't know who: there is nobody left. _He came for me in Acre_ , he insists, arguing with his shadow, _it doesn't matter about the other times; he came for me then, the worst time_.

Now that Vaisey is dead, no one will ever again speak to him of those hours after Marian died, those first horrible days and weeks. Better to be mocked – and Vaisey has mocked him – than for it all to be forgotten. In France, Guy tried to fall on his new sword, as the ancients did, and wounded himself. Vaisey laughed at him, beat him with a mildness more suited to correcting an apprentice caught in some trivial wrongdoing – most unlike him, and strangely humiliating in itself – and ordered him to swear by Marian's grave not to repeat his foolishness. Guy was bared to the waist when he took the oath, bandaged by the French physician, scarcely able to keep his feet but afraid to sink down onto the bed in front of Vaisey.

He looked into his master's calm eyes and thought he saw hatred there. _I failed him_ , he thought. _I could have killed the King, instead of her_. Guy did not know then and he does not know now why Vaisey wanted to keep him out of Hell when he was ready to throw himself into the pit as if it were not full of fire – his worst of all nightmares, for many years – but were instead an embrace by white-clad arms, a coming home. It will, after all, be a coming home of sorts, he knows that now. _No one will help you_ , he repeats, trying to force the tears to stop. Even on warm nights, the castle stone stays cold, and it's leeching the last warmth from him.

 _Everyone dies except for me and Hood_ , Guy thinks, not daring to look at the body again; _Hood is invincible, and I am a scourge_. His leg is slippery with blood. He thinks, _I want help, I want help, but he will not come, I have killed him_.

**Author's Note:**

> ...sorry it's sad. The Guy feels are strong in me. If anyone reads this and wants to suggest a particular prompt for an angsty Guy-centric missing scene, hmu! though I can't promise for certain to do it because of other writing commitments.


End file.
